


we are not what we were before (rebirth requires fire)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: run baby run [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: All the guilt, Bucky has some identity issues, Bucky's heart eyes, Darcy is not dealing with the whole killing bit very well, Darcy's emotional intimacy issues, Forgiveness, Gen, Have I mentioned there's guilt?, Nightmares and panic, Out damn spot, Pre-Relationship, These children need to be kinder to themselves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-10 18:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7856593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy killed seven men to keep James safe.</p><p>They deal with the emotional aftermath as best they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. bedside vigil

**Author's Note:**

> Cross posted to [tumblr](http://mouseymightymarvellous.tumblr.com/post/149423032180/we-are-not-what-we-were-before-rebirth-requires).
> 
> Set after the events of [we don't see eye-to-eye (call this a trust fall)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7847167), part iii.
> 
> At some point, this will get one, maybe two more chapters. Just not exactly sure when. (Or what. Planless author is bad at planning.)

The night stretches out, punctuated by Darcy's slow breathing as she sleeps.

The Winter Soldier watches the door of the motel room, knives laid out at precise angles on the table as he cleans them, wary of any sign that Hydra has found them after the disaster of the week before. He itches to move, to run, to disappear—by stopping for the night, they give any pursuers the chance to catch up—but the girl needs sleep. She's done an admirable job of keeping up, of keeping them safe, but she's spent more time than she should awake and adrenaline-filled over the course of the past eight days; she needs to rest. The Winter Soldier will have to trust in his skills at getting them off the grid, and be prepared for anything that Hydra might bring down on them.

Not being prepared is what got them into this situation in the first place.

The Winter Soldier considers that it is the girl's fault: that she has made him soft, blunted his edges. The Winter Soldier considers if leaving her here in the night to strike out on his own, leaving this woman-child with her soft smiles and light touch, would not be the more tactically sound decision. (Permafrost endures, but she warms him into something kinder.)

The Winter Soldier has considered leaving the girl behind every night as he watches over her slumber for months now. He never does.

(James remembers Darcy in the moonlight, promising with a bruised voice to fight for his memories, for his salvation; remembers Darcy snarling with torn knuckles, seeing the world in all its pettiness and cruelty, and vowing to be kind; remembers waking to Darcy, concerned and trembling, holding it together to get them safe, to get him safe.

Bucky remembers "to the end of the line".

(They mean the same thing.))

She's not meant to get hurt in this quest of his (theirs). She's not ever supposed to get hurt.

And she might not need stitches or bandages, but even the Winter Soldier can see she's walking wounded. (The worst bruises are on the soul.)

There are dangers he cannot keep watch for in the night. Not when his heavy metal hand deals nothing but damage and his memories sift through him like sand in a sieve.

He does what he can.

It isn't enough. It's never enough.

The soft breaths which he has been using to track time are suddenly quickening, becoming short and panicked. Darcy shifts from her curled position and starts to thrash.

The Winter Soldier shifts in his seat, hands going immediately to the knives on the table beside him, ready to fight the threat. But this is not an enemy he can fight with knives or guns of the coiled violence in his bones.

The minutes quicken, blurring together with her breaths.

The Winter Soldier waits, trying to think of a battle strategy, to no avail. Her short staccato breathing punctures him like shrapnel, carving deep cuts into his skin. But he doesn’t move, just grips at the table edge until it groans in protest.

There is nothing he can do to fix this.

She screams, finally, a horrible wounded sound, and Bucky breaks. He moves to touch her, to draw her out of whatever has ensnared her sleeping mind, but startles back when she bolts upright and claws her way out of the twisted sheets. She stumbles off of the bed, eyes wide and unseeing, another scream clawing at her throat.

James lets her go, lets her throw herself into the bathroom. He doesn’t dare make a grab for her; he doesn’t want to scare her any further.

She slams the door behind her as she rushes to throw the tap on.

The water pouring into the sink and Darcy’s choked out gasps are loud in the night.

James stays frozen part way out of his chair, any possible dangers from outside of the motel room forgotten for the moment. There are enough dangers right in front of him for him to deal with.

He’s cautious as he prowls softly to the bathroom door.

His light knock goes unanswered.

“Darcy?” he asks. “Can I come in?”

She doesn’t answer him.

“Darcy, I’m coming in unless you tell me not to,” James warns.

Again, she doesn’t respond, so James pushes the door open.

Darcy is standing at the sink, scrubbing at her hands. The water is steaming—obviously too hot—her hands pinking under the heat.

“Jesus!” He scrambles to throw the cold water on.

Darcy doesn’t react to the temperature change, she just keeps scrubbing viciously. She’s sobbing out words through her tears as she scours her skin.

He murmurs nonsense to her, hands hovering anxiously over her back as he tries to figure out what to do.

She doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps scrubbing, words and sobs and keening.

"Oh, Darcy-girl," James croons, desperately trying to remember how to be soft. He catches her hands in his own. "Oh sweetheart, enough of that."

Darcy whimpers and tugs at his grip. He resists, sweeping circles along her knuckles, trying to soothe her.

"It won't come off," she rasps.

He turns her hands over, smoothes them open so the palms are facing the ceiling.

"There ain't nothin' there, sweetheart."

Darcy swings her head up to look at him, soft mouth twisted in confusion. "Can't you see the blood?"

And that's just. Oh, Darcy.

Bucky remembers long nights next to boys in trenches, the blood and the mud so soaked into their hair and their boots that no amount of scrubbing could ever really get it out. He sat with them in the dark, screams and cries and the stench of fire and death in the air. So few of those boys ever made it home whole.

And the Winter Soldier is bathed in oceans of blood. He's surprised, somedays, that he doesn't leave footprints in his wake.

James regrets—he aches with it—that Darcy's been brought to this. He never wanted this for her. (And what, he berates himself, did you think she would get for helping you?) He should have been better, more alert, more aware, not so goddamn stupid, if he'd wanted to keep her safe from this.

Carefully, so carefully, as carefully as he remembers how, he raises her hands and presses kisses to those soft palms. He loves these small hands: they clatter across keyboards and tear absentmindedly at nail beds and drum along to music and reach out without hesitation to touch him and make him real.

Darcy gasps, a strangled sound of shock and protest. "Don't! You'll get it on you!"

"Oh, sweetheart," the Winter Soldier chuckles darkly, "there isn't anything you can do to me that I haven't done worse." And then he drops another set of kisses to the thin skin of her wrists, and then another to her battered knuckles.

"I don't. I can’t—“ She's holding herself stiff enough to shatter, but then she's gives in, lets herself fall into him, trembling.

And James catches her, pulls her into his chest, lets her burrow her face into his throat and sob.

He finds himself humming, a long forgotten tune, as he drags wide circles on her back. Bucky knows how to do this; it's muscle memory, instinct. (He had thought Hydra had burned this gentleness out of him, along with the rest of the things that made him Bucky Barnes, but apparently some things go deeper than memory: they're written in the bones, in the blood.)

He scoops her up with an arm under her thighs, reaches out a hand to finally turn off the taps, walks her from the bathroom to a bed. Then he curls them together on the covers, her head tucked under his chin, those lovely, bloodied hands twisted into his shirt.

Eventually, her sobs fade into hitching gasps and then smooth into slow breaths. Bucky continues to sing as she sleeps. James shelters her body with his own. And the Winter Soldier stands watch, daring the night to encroach.


	2. daybreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say thanks to everybody who has read/left kudos/commented on this little series! You are the wind beneath my wings (the caffeine for my late nights).

Darcy wakes warm and safe.

There is something solid and steady pressed along her spine, the backs of her thighs. A soothing rhythm lulls her back into that waking dream state where all she knows is warmth and safety and the pleasant weight of her limbs and the faint aching in her head. A thought tugs at the edges of her awareness, but she bats it lazily away, content to drift away on waves of sleep.

Darcy dozes.

When she finally pulls herself fully into the waking world, the memory of last night, of the past week, of what she did nine days ago hits her like Jane’s Pinzgauer barrelling through a desert storm.

She bolts upright, gasping, hands coming up to be examined for bloodstains. The skin is tender, raw from friction and heat.

“Careful there, Darce,” James warns from behind her.

Darcy starts, and whips her head around to find him stretched out along the bed: broad and steady and warm. She wants to curl back into him, forget last night, last week, the world. She wants to fall back into that half-way state where there was just warmth and safety and quiet breathing. She wants to forget.

(And that feels a little bit like betrayal, when all James wants is to remember.)

“I’m,” she croaks. “Shit. Sorry. I’m sorry.” She waves a hand around aimlessly, trying and failing to convey all that she’s sorry for.

James’ hands are gentle as they capture her own: a vivid sense memory from the night before.

“Nothin’ to be sorry for, sweetheart.” He pulls her right hand up and presses his mouth to her palm.

Darcy shivers, her emotions a tangle of distress and pleasure. His lips are soft and his breath is warm and she wonders if he would be able to taste iron in the creases of her palm if he dared dart his tongue out to lap at the salt on her skin.

Her breath shudders out of her, and she chokes back a sob. She doesn’t think she has enough water in her to cry after last night; she needs to drink three glasses of water and down some painkillers and sleep for a year before she can even consider giving into tears again. But she’s wrong, apparently, because she can feel more traitorous tears burning trails down her cheeks. Her head throbs.

“Oh, Darce,” James sighs, and he pulls her down into his broad chest.

Darcy goes, allows herself to press her face into his shirt to muffle the anguish leaking out of her.

James is a solid bulwark against the flood of tears, rocking her gently in his lap, something almost a lullaby rumbling in his chest. She lets the vibrations lull her back towards that earlier state, far away from the memory of gunshots piercing the air and her steady, steady hands.

When she’s cried herself out again, James doesn’t pull away, so she leaves her face buried in his chest as she hiccups and shakes.

“Darcy, sweetheart,” he tells her, “you can’t go on like this.”

Darcy shivers. “I know.”

They’re silent for a while.

“I don’t know what to do.”

James huffs a bitter laugh. “You’re telling me. We’re a right mess.”

“Shit,” Darcy snorts. “Yeah. Yeah, we are.”

“You’re gonna be alright though. You hear me?” He shakes her gently with a hand at the nape of her neck.

Darcy pulls back from where she’s let herself stay buried in his warmth to look him in the eye. His eyes are blue and warm and deep, like an afternoon sky on a sunburnt summer day. She wants to fall into them and drown. “You’re going to be alright, too.”

She isn’t sure that she believes it, but she wants so badly for it to be true, for both of them.

She doesn’t want to wake again the way she did in the night; the phantom sensation of blood thick and heavy on her hands because she killed someone. She took a gun and she shot a man—seven men—through the head with it and their blood was bright and brilliant on the bland concrete and she can still hear their breathing shuddering to a stop and she wonders if there are people waiting for them to come home—partners and children and family and friends and, fuck, she doesn’t know, dentists and dog walkers and baristas—waiting for someone who will never walk in the door because Darcy waved a gun around like she knew what she was doing with it. “Never point it at anything you don’t want to shoot,” and Darcy hadn’t wanted to shoot them, had never wanted to shoot anyone, but she had. She had. shehadshehadshehad. (And she doesn’t regret it. Not really. Not with James here and safe and warm wrapped around her and what does that make her?)

“I can’t do it again,” she tells him, her voice breaking.

“Darcy,” he sighs, at a loss for how to make this mess better.

“No,” she snaps, wrenching herself from his grip and out of his lap. “I can’t— I’ve never— I don’t.” She smacks her palms into the coverlet in frustration. “I don’t want to be that person. I’ve never wanted to be that person.”

James flinches.

“I never want to be a killer,” she finishes.

Darcy never wanted to be anything like the Winter Soldier. (Bucky Barnes never wanted to be anything like the Winter Soldier either, but then he got drafted to the war and learned how to shoot a man in the head from a half mile away. And he put those skills to good use keeping himself and his men alive. Bucky Barnes might have hated being a killer, but Sargent Barnes understood the necessity.

Darcy understands the necessity too. But she isn’t a soldier, and this isn’t war.

(And isn’t that just not true. She might not have known she was signing up for war when she held her hand out and asked him to run, but war is where she’s found herself. She could leave, walk away, take the next plane back to the States or over to Sokovia to help out with NCN’s relief work or anywhere that isn’t at James’ side.

She won’t. And what does that make her?))

“I never wanted this for you,” is all he can give her. The only comfort he can give that isn’t a lie.

She tries to smile for him. “I know.”

Tentatively, he reaches out his hand to her.

She takes it. Clings.

James sighs with what he would deny is relief.

“Ok,” he says. “Ok. No more unnecessary killing.” The Winter Soldier snarls, no Hydra death is unnecessary. But if that’s what she needs to be safe, to be sane, then he’ll do it.

“But Darcy,” he warns, “I’m not going to hesitate if it might mean your life.”

Her jaw clenches, but she nods.

“You do what you have to to keep yourself safe, but you don’t do anything more.” Not even, he means, for him. Especially not for him. Not at the price of her soul.

“I—“ she nods. “Ok. Ok.”

James brings his metal hand up to cup her cheek. Darcy leans into the contact.

“I’ve got you,” he swears to her. “I’ve got you.”

Darcy turns her face into his palm and presses a kiss there. “I know.”

This isn’t the end to the nightmares, she knows. And this isn’t the end of this discussion. “No more unnecessary killing” is pretty vague, and is going to leave a lot more Hydra agents for them to arrange to fall into the custody of trustworthy law enforcement agencies. But it’s a start. A start that might let them be something other than soldiers in a war spanning over seven decades.

They have a start and they have each other. It’s enough for now.

They sit perched on the bed—entwined by their hands and their promises—until they need to leave.

Darcy can still feel the heat of his touch on her face, long after they’ve pulled away.


	3. knives in the dark

Bucky wakes to a small, beloved body shaking itself apart in his arms. Hacking coughs try to expel something deadly caught in the lungs; a body betrays itself. 

He drags his hands up and down the sweat soaked back. He would take that illness and hurt and helplessness into his own skin if he could. He keeps his breathing steady, trying to induce a sympathetic response, a quieting of the coughing of the body beneath his hands. 

"C'mon, Stevie," he mumbles—again, another time too many—desperately, "y'gotta try 'n breathe with me."

Steve shakes apart under another storm of coughing. 

Bucky does his best to tamp down on the worry that this time will be too much. That this cough and this sickness and this long winter will be more than Steve's body can bear. And he has to stop himself from choking on the unfairness of it: that Steve, the best man he'll ever know, is betrayed and betrayed and betrayed again by his flesh. Steve who fights the world for being unfair with every breath that he takes, long after the world expected him to lay down and die. 

The wracking coughs continue, pressing soft breasts into the planes of his chest with every forceful exhale. 

And, wait. That's not—

The person under his hands is small with the beginnings of lithe musculature under gorgeous curves, not an awkward collection of bruises and bone. They are sleep warm, not burning with sickly heat. And they are crying, not coughing. 

"Darcy," James sighs. It's 2015 and he's curled up on the only bed in this crappy hostel room in the middle of nowhere Romania with a metal arm and a gaping hole where his soul used to be. And a girl. A girl who looks at him with the promise of spring in her eyes: rebirth and the melting of snow. How is it, he wonders, that she can still look at him with springtime eyes when she knows what he is and what he has done? How can she bear to look at him when she tears herself to bloody pieces every night for his failure?

He’ll take it anyways—despite his guilt—take and take and take from her until she wises up and leaves. He doesn’t have the strength to walk away from her and her springtime eyes.

And, anyways, he promised. He _promised_. And that matters more than anything.

He is nothing but what Hydra gave him and the pieces of Sargent James Buchanan Barnes that he’s managed to collect and the promises he’s given this girl in his arms. It’s not enough, not enough to make him Steve Roger’s Bucky again, not enough for him to be a decent man, let alone a good one; but it’s enough for him to keep catching Darcy when she stumbles, for as long as she’ll let him. He promised. (“To the end of the line.”)

He settles back down, content to keep her even as she mumbles and furrows her brow in her sleep. That familiar foreign tune hums through him as he tries his best to soothe her. He does his best to let Bucky rise to the surface: the man who nursed Steve Rogers through cold after asthma attack after allergic reaction remembers how to pet and cajole and hold. The motions fit badly, mismatched instincts clashing as the Winter Soldier rears his head.

James perseveres, determined to be gentle with the girl in his arms.

She should never know the Winter Soldier, but especially not like this: fragile and shattering and weak in a way Hydra would have never stood for. (The Winter Soldier once beat weakness out of little girls with springtime eyes until they grew strong or broke. (Too many broke.))

Despite his best efforts, her breathing quickens, her eyes dart under their closed lids, her frown deepens. And then she comes to all of a sudden, almost smashing her head under his chin as she jolts awake.

“Hey,” he murmurs, “hey.”

Darcy panics for a moment in his hold, and then collapses into it.

“James,” she sighs.

He nods, the name mostly true at the moment, despite the phantom of Bucky lingering behind his eyes.

She goes to pull away from him, and he lets her, metal hand disengaging from her hip with a protesting whine of servos. Darcy rolls up to sit on the edge of the bed, hands coming up to rub at her mouth.

“What was it this time?” he asks her after a few moments of silence. It’s what she asks him every time she catches him mired in a fragmented memory, and it feels like the right thing to ask her in return: a ritual. (“Punk.” “Jerk.”)

Darcy licks her lips and turns her face so her long tangle of hair shields her from his gaze.

“You—“ she pauses, swallows. James’ throat aches with the knowledge of memories that cut you to pieces as you speak them aloud.

“You were dead. You and Jane and Baba and everyone else. And my hands were so steady on the gun.”

“Darcy,” James rasps. Because shit, that’s— He knows those nightmares, knows them intimately, the way only someone who has lived those nightmares can. Knows the shape of them under his skin and in the mirror and shit, she wouldn’t. She would never.

“Darcy, it’s not your fault.”

Darcy laughs, a terrible thing. “Of course it’s my fault! I pulled the trigger!”

“It’s not your fault!” James shakes her, guilt and terror and fury in his voice and in his blood. This is not only about this and last week and the despair on Darcy’s face he recognizes, in the small part of his brain that isn’t screaming, that hasn’t been screaming for the past seventy years. This is not only about Darcy, but about the nightmare that they now share that is not only a nightmare for him, but the truth. But— “This is not. Your. Fault.”

Darcy spins, hair flaring around her face. She’s a goddess: too terrible to look at straight on. “Then whose fault is it, James?” she demands. “Because there was no one else shooting at those men in that street!”

“It was my fault,” he tells her, quiet.

She pauses, deflating, confusion in the turn of her mouth. “What?”

“It was my fault. My fault for getting caught. My fault for not expecting the trigger word. My fault you had to pick up that gun. My fault you had to shoot anyone. Fuck! It’s my fault you’re even here! Jesus Christ, Darcy, you should be somewhere safe, not stuck hiding from Hydra, waking up screaming every night for nightmares!” By the end, he’s standing, his breathing heavy.

And Darcy is standing too, face-to-face with him, not faltering. He could break her to pieces, and yet she stands in front of him and refuses to back down at his fury.

"It was my choice! I wasn't forced into running with you! You don't get to make my decision about you!” she snarls.

"You're only here because of me!"

Darcy stills, licks her lips. "Steve asked you," she tells him, plunging a knife into his chest that he has no defence for, and twisting, ”if you wanted to join the Howling Commandos."

"What?" James asked, startled out of his anger, and confused and uneasy at this exploration of a past he's only barely starting to remember. He can feel his shoulders coming up to his ears, his body curling into itself.

"After he stormed that first Hydra base. To save the 107th, I mean."

James shakes his head, because he doesn't remember. He knows the story, but he doesn't remember. (He doesn’t want to remember.)

"You were going to be discharged back States-side,” Darcy continues, undeterred. “But he asked you to stay and fight beside him. And you said yes." Her face twists with some complicated mixture of emotions. "Do you regret it?"

Bucky trembles. Regret it? He clutches at a bar—terror in his veins because oh god, he isn't ready to die, especially not with Steve watching—and he can feel gravity betraying him. When he falls, it takes and age, and he doesn't expect to wake again.

Except he does.

Bucky looks down at his mismatched hands, so drenched in blood that he forgets what it feels like to be clean.

Does he regret it?

“I don’t know,” James manages to grate out through a throat torn to pieces by the shrapnel of his shattered heart.

Darcy flinches.

“I don’t know,” James says. Because he can’t remember enough to know if it was all worth it, not when all he’s left with is his burnt-out soul and seventy years of tragedy left by the Winter Soldier.

They stand in silence.

“I don’t,” Darcy tells him, but she doesn’t look him in the eye.

They stand in silence, and it is a painful eternity before the sun wakes to kiss the horizon good morning.

When they move on from the hostel, the night is not so easily left behind.


	4. playground games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters to go to finish out this Nightmares arc, and nine more ficlets planned out ("planned out" *waves hands*) for the series. run baby run has been an adventure in stumbling into something almost a plot, it feels good to have something resembling a plan.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has read/left kudos/commented/bookmarked. I'd love to hear about what works for you/doesn't work for you and what you'd like to see. Also, I occasionally break out into character analyses and such in the comments, so. If you're interested... (awkward author feels awkward) Yeah!

Darcy presses her back up against the building as she takes deep, steadying breaths.

The Hydra goons are waiting for her around the corner.

She breathes, and then she steps around the edge of the building, gun coming up to sight the first goon. He hasn’t moved from where she marked his position and she pulls the trigger.

Boom. Headshot.

The brilliant red of his blood on the pavement is cut with grey.

Brains, her mind supplies, faintly hysteric giggles welling in her throat. It must be brains.

Darcy turns her gaze away from the gore, back to the man whose head she’s just put a bullet through. She’s expecting the heavy brow and dark features she spotted before, and so she recoils in shock and horror at what she finds.

Darcy collapses at the corpse’s side, hands hovering desperately over the chest.

“No,” she gasps. “No! This isn’t right— I didn’t mean to—” Her voice trails off, words insufficient to convey the blades in her abdomen, the bile on her tongue.

Baba is collapsed awkwardly on the cold, unforgiving ground.

Her yellow checked dress is peppered with blossoming gunshot wounds. She’s wearing her favourite pair of gardening sandals. Her familiar, loved features are tearstained, twisted with pain and despair.

Darcy wrenches her gaze away, desperate to see anything but this, and there are Jane and Eric, Mr Ellison and Mr Bradley, Rebecca from elementary school, the Mason twins from foster care, Sansa from college, old friends and teachers and coworkers and people she’s passed in the street and they’re all dead, they’re all dead, they’re all lying there with the backs of their heads blown out and Darcy was the one who did it, Darcy Lewis with the Sig P229 nine-millimeter in her steady, steady hands.

Darcy drops the gun, backs away, and catches a glimpse of what she’s wearing in a grimy storefront window: black tac gear. A skull with six tentacles sits proudly on her bicep.

She wakes screaming.

James catches her hands before she can claw at her arm too badly.

(James is always there, catching her, it seems.)

“Hey,” he soothes her. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. We’re safe. That’s it, that’s m’ girl. You just keep breathing, sweetheart. That’s it.”

Darcy can feel her heartbeat slowing, the frantic need to bolt leeching from her limbs as James continues his low string of comforting nonsense. His voice is a familiar rasp of velvet in the dark.

Her eyes adjust to the dim light leaking through the motel curtains, picking out the weapons arrayed on the table for cleaning, the position of the single chair, James still in the previous day’s clothes. He hasn’t been sleeping. Again. Instead, he’s spent another night alert and on watch, both for the immediate danger of Hydra having tracked them in their fast, erratic flight and the more amorphous danger of her continuing nightmares.

As if he wasn’t already not getting enough sleep as it was. And Darcy with her goddamn nightmares has just gone and made it worse.

“Sorry,” she sighs through her ruined throat. It aches from screaming.

“Hey, now,” James chides, “you know the rules, we don’t apologize for this.”

Darcy goes to scowl, goes to hug herself. “’s not the same.”

James scowls right on back. “‘Course it is.”

She shrugs it off. Her guilty conscious isn’t nearly the same as seventy plus years of tragedy and horror. But he’s right, it’s the rules.

“Think you can fall back to sleep?”

She considers it, but the memory of her dead laid out in that street looms over her shoulder like a particularly bleak carrion bird. “No.”

He sighs, and shifts from crouching in front of her to sit at her side on the bed. “Too early to leave just yet.” He sounds apologetic.

Darcy nods in agreement. Too bad, she’s jittery from the misplaced adrenaline screaming through her veins. She might vibrate out of her skin—or out of her mind—if she’s stuck in this dark room with regret and blood welling on the back of her tongue. She wants to run, to fly, to flee her past, leave it behind, misplaced, under the bed or behind a dresser in one of the many miscellaneous motel rooms and abandoned houses they pass through.

So far, outrunning her problems hasn’t been much help. Doesn’t mean she isn’t willing to try again.

“Wanna go for a run?”

James looks at her, skeptical. “Sun’s not even up yet.”

She shrugs, a non-verbal “so?”.

He snorts at her. “Yeah, alright. You think you can keep up?”

It’s Darcy’s turn to look skeptical. “Nope, but I can try.”

The air is not kind when they finally stumble out of their room and into the neon motel lighting; neither of them is wearing enough layers to be warm in light of the far-off dawn and the season. Darcy amuses herself by breathing open mouthed plumes of dragon breath into the night.

“C’mon,” James grunts, anxious to get moving.

Darcy huffs out another spurt of iced fire and giggles at herself, startling them both with the childlike sound. “Yeah, okay, I forgot that you’re delicate in the cold, Mr. Winter Soldier.”

They stare at each other, taken aback at her teasing, and Darcy slaps a gloved hand over her mouth.

“Omigod! I can’t believe I just said that!” She’s horrified, can’t believe that she poked fun at a man who used to be cryogenically frozen and put away like a weapon until he was needed again by the monsters who stripped him of his humanity.

And then James—shattered James of the dark eyes and grim mouth—laughs at her, his head thrown back to bare his throat as the sound rumbles through the pre-dawn. Darcy stares at him, wide-eyed, a smile slowly overpowering her confusion to tug at her lips. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen him this unguarded and mirthful. Her horror over her tasteless jibe falls away as she watches him laugh.

It’s beautiful.

His laughter eventually begins to peter out, the process of calming himself interrupted now and then by sudden renewed spurts of chortling. His breathing finally eases and he drops his head back down to look at her. She isn’t quite sure what to make of the shimmer in his blue-sky eyes.

James reaches out with both hands to frame her face, and he holds her still as he bends and presses a kiss to her forehead, just beneath the edge of her knit hat. He lingers there, the remnants of chuckles still echoing through his body. When he pulls back, his smile is broad and the most wonderful thing she’s ever seen.

“What?” she asks, self-conscious about the way he’s looking at her like she’s something precious.

He shakes his head. “Darcy Lewis,” he tells her, his voice warm and full of sunshine, “thank you.”

Darcy can only look at him, confused.

“Thank you, for being so indomitable.”

“I’m not—” she starts.

“Yes,” he presses onto her. “You laugh in the face of everything that I was. That’s— You don’t even know, do you, how incredible that is? To be able to look at my past and still laugh.”

Darcy is shaking her head, because that’s just the way she is, laughing over the bad so that you don’t hurt so goddamned much.

“I didn’t think I would laugh again, after everything. But you teach me that I can, that it’s possible.” His smile is so wide and so bright, Darcy wants to look away. He stares at her like she is a gift. “You’re going to be okay, y’know.”

He doesn’t say it like it’s a question. He says it like it’s fact.

And when he says it while looking at her with sunshine in his smile—this man who was torn to pieces until only a soldier remained and had not thought he could ever be anything else again—when he says it, she almost believes it. She _wants_ to believe it.

She ducks her head, away from that too-blue gaze.

“Yeah,” she nods, knocking her foot into the toe of his boot, “yeah, okay.”

And then, because she has never really learned how to deal with real emotion, she kicks his toe harder. “Tag!” she yells, already turning and sprinting away. “You’re it!”

And then she runs, cold wind burning her cheeks. Or maybe that’s the smile stretching over her face.

And then she runs, his startled laugh chasing at her heels.

And then she runs. And James follows after.


	5. starlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Partly inspired by [this lovely tumblr post](http://naamahdarling.tumblr.com/post/149355013780/i-will-trade-you-one-terrible-memory-for-a-memory).
> 
> Apologies if this is a bit more atmospheric and disjointed than usual. I wrote almost 80% of it on the bus, which tends to put me in particularly whimsical moods.
> 
> minor edits, Oct 19/16: thanks to **lost_in_mirkwood** for correcting my knowledge of US geography

She wakes quietly, without the usual screaming and clawing. But her breathing is still unsteady and she reaches for him, looking for something to cling to. 

He wishes he could hold her. Wishes he was curled up on the bed next to her, soothing the nightmares away. But the Winter Soldier is pressed heavy and close against the backs of his eyes and he's only holding on to the tattered patchwork of a person he's managed to piece together with the tips of his fingers. 

He does not know how to be gentle this night. Not when even the lightest of breezes could push him over the edge. 

It would be so easy to let go and fall into the cold's embrace. 

"James?" she asks, voice threaded through with a newfound uncertainty. 

He grunts, the most he can manage around a throat closed to anything not an affirmative to an order from the Handler. The Winter Soldier has no name other than his title and this sleep-warm girl, all soft hair and soft mouth and soft pyjamas, is no Handler.

"Mostly-James?" Darcy asks, eying his posture and the ice crackling at his edges through bleary eyes, the uncertainty in her voice replaced by something sharp and furious. "Fuck. Sorry." 

He manages a shrug even though the muscles of his back scream in protest. The Winter Soldier has no use for sentiment.

"Anything I can do to help?"

No. The Winter Soldier does not require assistance beyond that which the Handler provides to complete the mission objective.

"Right then."

The silence that falls between them is terrible, full of writhing thoughts and the echoes of screams. (It is so cold and Bucky hurts and he hurts and he hurts. And then they find him, and it is impossibly colder, and he hurts and he hurt and he hurtshurtshurts.)

James can feel the frost unfurling in his bones. He wonders if the air would freeze if he were to breathe open-mouthed.

The Winter Soldier is waiting patiently for the slightest lapse in control: he doesn't know impatience, only the inhalation before the shot and the way a knife sits in the curve of a palm. James pushes back, but his mind is splintering under the heavy press of his history—all the impossible weight of it—and he does not stand a chance when all the Winter Soldier needs is a moment.

(The bark of the tree he is perched in scratches uncomfortably at a couple of healing scrapes, but Bucky doesn’t dare shift from his position. Steve, the fucking idiot, decided to take the Hydra base without backup, even though the Howlies are significantly outnumbered. The stupid punk is going to get them all killed if he keeps this up. But there were reports of local kids disappearing into the base and never coming out, so. Bucky sits back and helpfully sees to it that any Hydra goon who gets too close gets a nice new hole through his head with a well placed bullet before they have the chance to take advantage of the shield’s small size. (There is Captain America’s shield, and then there is what Bucky Barnes is to Steve Rogers. They aren’t too different, really.))

(The briefing from the Handler contained SHIELD’s timetable for the scientist’s extraction down to the minute. The Winter Soldier needs only wait for the car to pass by his nest. He spends the time with thoughts more empty than the tundra. He waits, and that is all there is, the waiting and the counting down of the minutes. He shoulders his rifle, breathes, fires. The car skids off the cliff. When that isn’t enough, he puts another bullet right through the redhead’s stomach, into the scientist’s heart. (It feels familiar, knowing exactly where to aim to make redheaded girls bleed; except, of course, that nothing is familiar to the Winter Soldier but the feel of a weapon in his hand and the cold.))

The Winter Soldier is a sniper. He can wait longer than James can hold out. Long enough to find the proper fracture point and shatter James back into pieces.

The Winter Soldier knows how to wait in the silence and in the dark.

"I'm from Idaho." Darcy throws herself into the silence and the darkness unthinking, her hoarse voice sliding between the cracks of his psyche, shoring up his foundations. "Up near the northern border, potato country. I never really knew real heat until New Mexico.

Desert, y'know? Man, I'd never actually seen a cactus in person before or that much sand. It stretches forever, especially at night with the stars bright in the sky: just you under the light of some billion suns and the horizon out beyond forever.

But, the heat.

Somedays, when Jane finally sent me off early since she didn't need me for anything, I'd climb up on top of the RV with a blanket and just stretch out. Like a lizard. I'd get so sunburnt, since I'm pale as fuck, you’ve no idea. But it was worth it.

You can see the stars at night in their entirety in the desert, but they're always there, even when you can’t. And, really, what's sunshine but starlight?

So I'd sprawl on the RV roof, and pull the sunshine into my bones. And with it all that starlight and all those impossible eons.

We're made of stardust, you know. Starlight calls to our bones and our blood.

'Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.'

And yeah, in those moments under the desert sun, I was flames and the beginnings of the Universe barely kept in check by a fragile barrier of skin. 

So, trade me a memory James. An endless sunburnt afternoon with the stars wheeling unseen overhead for a memory you don't want to carry."

James hesitates.

But Darcy just smiles at him, all desert heat and impossibly far horizons. "I can hold it, until you can bear to take it back."

James looks at this woman of stars, and believes her. He opens his mouth, and lets all the sharp edges of the Winter Soldier spill over, cutting his tongue to pieces. 

She does not bleed. She shines.

(The Winter Soldier is a creature of silence and darkness. He cannot bear the light.)

(Darcy shines, and she boils the permafrost on his soul away.)


	6. fairy tales

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May I present: the last chapter for _we are not what we were before_! Thank you so, so, so much to everyone who has taken the time to read, to leave kudos, to comment, to bookmark, and to go through the rest of my fic and do the same. It's been a blast writing about my two lovelies caring for each other and healing and finding something like peace. There will be more parts to this series (off the top of my head, there's at least "Darcy &Jane: an epistolary tale of friendship", "10 glimpses into the strange platonic courtship between an ex-intern-cum-avenger and an artificial intelligence", "the sexual tension vignettes" (I'm hilarious), a prequel that covers Darcy's experience of events of CA:WS, Darcy&James taking on Hydra, the events of CA:CW, and a epilogue (wherein Steve Rogers would like to know who exactly is the woman with her mouth attached to his best friend's)), but, as I've been aggressively avoiding my term papers, that might be a couple months in appearing while school eats my brain.
> 
> I'd love to hear in the comments if there's any instalment that you'd prefer to see first (no promises as to the muse, but it might prevent my attention from completely straying) or what chapter was your favourite/what your favourite line was.
> 
> Thanks once again! Enjoy.

Darcy wakes slowly. She doesn’t want to move. It’s soft and warm where she is. But eventually the sounds of the day pull her from slumber, and she moans, buries her face in her pillow.

“C’mon, sleepy head,” a familiar voice teases. “Time to go.”

“Dn’ wanna,” she mumbles, “go ‘way.”

A heavy hand lands gently on her head, smoothing away the hair stuck attractively to her face. "We're gonna get kicked out of the room in a bit," he warns.

“’S not early ’nough,” she argues. “‘m still ‘sleep.”

“This you sleep-talkin’, then?”

“Mmm,” she hums an agreement and goes to sink back under that lovely warm ocean still floating around her. Sleep. She hasn’t had near enough of it lately; she feels dissolute, decadent, depraved as she wallows in bed. It’s _wonderful_.

And then James, the _bastard_ , whips the blankets off of her.

“What the hell?” Darcy shrieks, grasping awkwardly for covers that are no longer within reach.

He’s not much more than a dark blur in front of her when she’s not wearing her glasses, but she can _feel_ the self-satisfied grin on his face. _Bastard_.

“I hate you,” she moans, flopping backwards onto her pillows.

“No you don’t,” he responds cheerfully. “C’mon, get up.”

Darcy blows a raspberry in his general direction. “The worst.” She wriggles on the bed, trying to find a comfortable position despite her lack of blankets.

“Oh no you don’t.” And James _lifts_ her off of the bed and over his shoulder, which should be a difficult feat considering she’s struggling violently in protest, but he manages his new armful of wriggling Darcy with aplomb. She _hates_ him.

“I don’t wanna,” Darcy tells his ass from her uncomfortable position. Although, to be fair, it’s a lovely view, so she’s debating not complaining.

James sighs. “Darcy, it’s almost _noon_.”

And huh. Really? That’s new. (Or well, that’s old, in that sleeping till noon was a skill she cultivated as a teenager and mastered in college. But she has barely been sleeping through till _dawn_ lately, let alone noon.) “Huh.”

“Yeah, huh,” James grumbles. “When I tried to wake you up at about nine you rolled in your blankets like an crocodile with prey in its mouth or something.”

“Rude.”

“Just telling the truth.” He drops her in the small bathroom; a long, dangerous slide down the length of his body, the fabric of their shirts catching, sharp planes kissing her sleep-warm curves, a harsh inhale of breath.

James steps backwards. “Don’t you dare fall asleep in the shower or anything. We need to get going.”

Darcy sticks her tongue out at him, and goes to turn on the water.

When she emerges wreathed in towels and steam, magnitudes more awake, James has already packed up most of their things.

“Clothes?” Darcy demands, and James motions towards her still open bag, firmly _not_ looking at the way the towel around her chest is slipping precariously. They both rummage quietly, Darcy on the look out for a clean shirt and James stowing their cache of weapons in a variety of easily accessible compartments.

Darcy disappears back into the bathroom to change and do something to tame her hair. James laughs at the poorly done braid in her hair when she finally gives it up as a bad job.

"Yeah, yeah," Darcy grumbles, "laugh it up, asshole. You don't have room to judge."

James scowls and aborts his instinctual move to push his too long murder hair behind his ears. Darcy valiantly does not grin in victory.

In revenge, he tosses a sweater at her head, the heavy knit smacking her in the face. “Hey!” she yelps. “Not cool.”

He smirks. “You ready to go yet, princess?”

Darcy sniffs, and throws her nose up into the air. “I suppose if my dedicated servant has prepared my carriage, then we shall depart.”

“Servant?” He whistles. “I don’t even rate knight? And here I was, rescuing you from dangerously seductive blankets and carrying you off to safety!”

“Well,” Darcy waves a careless hand, “one measly metal arm is not quite enough to qualify as a knight in shining armour. And, for a princess, that is the only kind of knight that will do.”

James freezes for a moment at her careless reference to his prothesis, but quickly shakes off his surprise. Darcy was certain she was going to win this round of banter, but instead of conceding defeat, James stalks over—all dangerous edges and slick grins—and stops to loom in front of her, just close enough for her to be all too aware of exactly how broad his shoulders are and of the shocking heat radiating off his body. She wants to bury herself in him, but Darcy is made of sterner stuff and refuses to be undone by this man, so she tilts her head back and does her best to glare that impertinent smirk right off his beautiful fucking face.

And then the bastard reaches out his metal hand and tugs on one of the many strands of hair that have escaped her poorly done braid. She finds it impossible to look away from his sea-storm eyes as he rubs the curl between his fingers. (She absolutely does not wonder what sensations the sensors in his hand are transmitting. (Shimmering light, like sunshine glinting off a waterfall.)) “Well, princess,” he rasps, some half-remembered drawl tugging at his vowels, “haven’t you heard? I’m not exactly a good enough man to be some Prince Charmin’.”

Darcy licks her lips in a nervous tick, and James’ eyes flick down to track the motion. “What does that make you, then?”

“Hmm,” he sighs, tugging more firmly—once, twice, three times—on the curl still held between his fingers, before tucking it back behind her ear. He lets his hand linger there, his thumb and forefinger an almost not-there pressure along her jawline and at the delicate skin behind her ear. “A dragon, perhaps?”

Darcy steps further into him in challenge, forcing herself to tilt her head further back to keep their eyes locked, and causing his hand to settle more firmly on her cheek. If he were to shift it just a little, she could press her lips to the pad of his thumb. “It’s a good thing, then, that I’ve always found myself to be a self-rescuing princess. And, anyways, I never quite understood why any girl in her right mind would choose some boring prince over a dragon.”

James opens his mouth to respond, his eyes blue and blazing with something Darcy doesn’t know how to (doesn’t want to) name, when a fist pounds on the door and an angry voice yells something about check out times and charging for another night. James pulls away, and goes to argue with the proprietor of the motel, and Darcy finds herself unable to do much more than lock her knees against the sudden urge to sit and fan herself. Because what the hell was that? What the hell?

By the time James has sorted things with the man, Darcy has donned her sweater and jacket, and gathered together the rest of their things, as well as her wits.

“We good to go?” James asks, running his hand through his hair.

Darcy resists the urge to grab it, press a kiss to his palm. She shakes her head. “Yeah. This is everything.”

They sort out who takes what, James shouldering his black backpack and too many of their duffle bags. Darcy scowls at him, but he just mimes an exaggerated bow. As they step out into the sunshine, she ignores the warm hand pressing gently against the small of her back.

Their bags get arranged carefully in the backseat and a multitude of weapons get stored throughout the vehicle before Darcy straps on her seatbelt and James starts up the car.

“You didn’t have any nightmares last night,” James remarks as he pulls out of the parking lot.

Darcy tilts her head against her headrest to look at him.

“No,” she smiles, “I didn’t.”

He nods, his own smile tugging at his lips. “I’m glad.”

Darcy thinks about bloody hands and kisses pressed to palms, thinks about the sound of gunshots and half-forgotten lullabies, thinks about the recoil of a gun vibrating up her arm and the way she feels wrapped close in an embrace. Her smile is touched with something like grace. “Thank you.”

James lets the words fall lightly in the closed space of the car, not cheapening them by waving them off. Instead, he simply reaches up once more to tug on another errant curl.

Darcy turns her head to look out the window, trying to smother her widening smile.

She had no nightmares last night. Maybe they’ll visit again tonight when she falls asleep, or tomorrow, or in a week. Maybe she’ll still wake up screaming some nights, years and years from now. But she had no nightmares last night.

Darcy smiles, and moves to redo her braid.

Maybe she’ll coerce James into doing something with his hair.

That’s what they do, after all: they help, even when the other person doesn’t even know they need it. Maybe especially then.

Darcy braids, and hums a half-forgotten tune. It harmonizes well with the rumble of the engine and James joins in softly. The world whips by outside. The sun shines. Darcy braids, and hums, and is at peace.

It might not last, but it is enough.


End file.
